Monday, July 14, 2014

Israel’s Nazi-like criminal campaign in Gaza

Back in the early 1980s when I was a graduate student at
University of California, the student community organized a seminar on the
Palestine-Israel conflict. It was before the 1982 invasion of Lebanon (oddly
codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee), but Israel had already annexed a strip
of southern Lebanon since 1978, and had continued to occupy it in defiance of the
UN Resolution 425 that called for Israel to immediately and unconditionally
withdraw. Instead of withdrawing, Israel sponsored an anti-Palestinian
Christian-led fascist militia, called the South Lebanon Army, by arming,
paying, training and supporting them in the occupied zone.

Most of the audience, even the moderators in the seminar, included
hard-core Zionist supporters of Israel. Dr. Mahmoud Ayoub – of Lebanese descent
(now a professor emeritus at Temple University, Philadelphia), was the speaker
for the Palestinian-Lebanese cause. An angry Zionist retorted by stating that there
could never be peace with the Arabs and Palestinians who had attacked Israel in
1973 on the Yom Kippur day (the Jewish Day of Atonement when they fast). Dr. Ayoub
reminded him that Israel had repeatedly shelled and bombed Muslims in his
native south Lebanon during the month of Ramadhan, when Muslims fast from dawn
to nightfall.

Well, that killing spree of Palestinians has not ceased an
iota ever since. As of last Monday, this Ramadhan, at least 175 Palestinians,
mostly children and women, have been killed in Gaza as a result of weeklong Israeli
airstrikes since the beginning of Israel’s latest military operation
“Protective Edge”. Credible reports from Gaza suggest that ten times as many -
some 2000 - people have also been injured. One Israeli airstrike killed eight
members of the Haj family in their Khan Younis home last week. In another, 18
members of the extended Batsh family died as their home and a nearby mosque
were bombed. Even a medical center that catered to disabled and handicapped people
was not spared where two patients and a medical assistant died.

Israeli media reports over 1000 strikes since the operation
began, with 60 on the morning of July 10 alone. We are also told that the
Palestinian armed groups have fired more than 800 rockets in this latest
campaign. However, not a single Israeli has died as a result of such rocket
fires although 9 Israelis had sustained minor injuries while fleeing to
shelters.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government is keen on promoting
the ludicrous idea that it is only reacting to aggression from Hamas. Following
the footsteps of his diabolical boss, the Israeli Ambassador in the UN went a
step further to audaciously claim that while the IDF (Israel Defense Force) gives
15 minutes of warning to Gaza residents to vacate their homes before bombing
its target, the Israeli residents have only 15 seconds to take shelter when the
sirens, warning of impending rocket fire from Gaza, are heard. Real time
reporting by Al Jazeera, however, showed that the IDF gave less than a minute
of warning when it demolished Palestinian homes in its airstrikes.

But more remarkably, the social media like Twitter contradict
the mood of Israelis. What we notice instead of a panic-stricken people is a
picture of Israeli residents of the border town of Sderot leisurely watching
the IDF’s aerial bombardments of the Gaza Strip relaxing on lawn chairs. These
Israelis know well that with the Iron Dome Defense system in place, the rockets
fired from Gaza pose virtually no threats and are a mere nuisance or irritation
and nothing else; these are more like firecrackers that carry little risk!

Just as it has
happened many times before with every Israeli invasion, Netanyahu’s real goal
is far from defending Israel’s citizens.

Israel's real goal has been to destroy the Palestinian resistance, and
its infrastructure, and make lives of ordinary Palestinians miserable so that
they are forced to move out of their ancestral homes. In the late 1970s, in
Lebanon, Israel wanted to put in place a compliant, pro-Israeli regime in
Beirut. In 1982, when it appeared that Lebanon's civil war could drag on for
years with little chance of achieving those goals ever, Israel decided to move
on its own. But it needed approval from the USA, which had brokered a ceasefire
in 1981. Ariel Sharon visited Washington DC in May 1982, and got the ‘green
signal’ from the Reagan administration. Israel waited for a pretext, and that
came with an attempted assassination of Israel's ambassador in London on June 3
by Abu Nidal’s renegade, anti-PLO faction.

It did not matter that PLO had nothing to do with the London attack and
that some of its leaders were among the names on the would-be assassins' hit
list, three days later, on June 6, 1982 the Israeli army invaded Lebanon,
crossing the Litani River and moving as far north as Beirut. Beirut was
besieged and subjected to unfathomed bombing for two months. Casualties were
enormous, totaling more than 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, mostly
civilians. Hospitals were hit, and the Palestinian refugee camps were levelled
in massive bombardment.

As the world condemned Israeli butchery, the USA brokered a ceasefire in
August, which centered on the PLO leaving Beirut—its guerrillas, its doctors,
its civilian infrastructure, its officials—everyone and everything would board
ship heading for Tunis, far away from Occupied Palestine. The U.S. agreed to
serve as guarantor of Israel's promises, as protector of the Palestinian
civilians - primarily women, children and old men - left behind. U.S. Marines
were deployed as the centerpiece of an international force with a 30-day
mandate to guard Beirut during the withdrawal of the PLO fighters.

With the PLO fighters gone, and the multi-national peacekeeping force
also having left Beirut by September 11, the IDF gave green signal to its
surrogate Christian Phalangist forces to enter Sabra and Shatilla refugee
camps. It again needed a pretext, which came on September 14 with the
assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel – a Maronite Christian. It
did not matter that the assassin was a Christian Lebanese belonging to a rival
faction that was hostile to the Phalange and had no ties to PLO.

On September 15, the IDF surrounded the camps and stationed
troops at the exits of the area to prevent camp residents from leaving, and
fired illuminating flares at night to facilitate the slaughter of some 3,500 unarmed Palestinians over the next couple of days. Many of the bodies found had been severely mutilated. Many boys had been
castrated, some were scalped, and some had the Christian cross carved into
their bodies. Janet Lee Stevens, an American journalist, who had entered the
campswrote to her husband, Dr. Franklin
Lamb, "I saw dead women in their houses with their skirts up to their
waists and their legs spread apart; dozens of young men shot after being lined
up against an alley wall; children with their throats slit, a pregnant woman
with her stomach chopped open, her eyes still wide open, her blackened face
silently screaming in horror; countless babies and toddlers who had been
stabbed or ripped apart and who had been thrown into garbage piles."

So, what’s Netanyahu’s
pretext for the latest massacre of Palestinians of Gaza? It is hard to believe
that the death of three kidnapped Jewish youths was the reason for his
Nazi-like campaign in Gaza. After all, in revenge a Palestinian boy has been
burned to death by settler Jews. Weeks before the crisis, Israel had conducted incursions in almost every Palestinian city in
the West Bank, arrested over 380 Palestinians, bombed the Gaza strip, and
killed two Palestinians, Mahmoud Dudin, a 13 year old boy from Dura, and
Mustafa Aslan, 22 years old from Kalandia refugee camp, and injured hundreds. Among
those arrested were over 50 prisoners who were released in the exchange deal of
2011, including Nael Barghouthi, who had spent 34 years in Israeli jails. A
dozen parliamentarians were also arrested, bringing the number of imprisoned
Members of Parliament to 22. By June 25 already hundreds of Palestinians
detained had been observing hunger strike against administrative detention, one
of the worst forms of arbitrary detention, for more than 60 days. (It was one
of the longest collective hunger strikes ever observed outside the Guantanamo
Bay prison.) As noted by Palestinian activist, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Israel
decided to deal with this hunger strike through punitive measures, including
solitary confinement, transfer of prisoners, and deprivation of visitation
rights and seizing personal belongings. The international reaction to this
hunger strike has been inadequate, which contributed to further repression of
the prisoners.

In recent days,
Israeli forces raided a compound in Hebron and made several arrests while
searching for two Hamas members suspected of killing those three Israeli
teenagers. On Monday, a 21-year-old Palestinian, Munir Badarin, was shot in the
leg south of the West Bank city of Hebron during confrontations with Israeli
soldiers, and left without medical attention until he bled to death.

Netanyahu’s is a vicious, racist government that does not
value Palestinian lives and properties. It is
collectively punishing everyone – from an infant to a nursing mother to a
handicapped Palestinian – for the rockets fired from Gaza. Such actions qualify
as war crimes. So far only 7 militants have died as a result of Israel’s latest
campaign, i.e., a whopping 95% of the Palestinian victims have been unarmed
civilians who have no protection against bombs and missiles dropped on them.

As aptly noted by the veteran British Jewish lawmaker,
Sir Gerald Kaufman, Israeli offensive in Gaza is comparable to the Nazis who
forced his family to flee from Poland.Kaufman, who was
brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said: "My grandmother was
ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead
in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers
murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.”

Sir Kaufman is right in comparing Netanyahu’s criminal
activities in Gaza with those of the Nazis. Khaled Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian
father, has claimed that he saw two of his young daughters (Amal – aged 2, and
Suad – aged 7) shot dead and another (Samer, aged 4) critically injured by an
Israeli soldier who emerged from a stationary tank and opened fire as the
family obeyed an order from the Israeli forces to leave their home. He said,
"Two soldiers were on the tank eating chips, then one man came out of the
tank with a rifle and started shooting the kids." By the way, this
incident is not an exception. As Al-Jazeera has shown the IDF did not allow
even two minutes to safely evacuating elderly Palestinians from their targeted
homes for demolition. Many elderly Palestinians have been buried with the ruins
of their homes in Gaza.

An estimated 17,000 Palestinians remained holed up at U.N.
facilities Monday after fleeing their homes the day before as Israel advised
civilians to evacuate the town of Beit Lahiya and its surroundings ahead of an
attack. The number of Palestinians killed in the nearly week-old campaign has
already topped the death toll of Israel’s operation in Gaza in November 2012,
an eight-day offensive that ended with a cease-fire that more or less held up
until the recent eruption. What’s next?

Zionist hawks like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman want a
permanent solution to the crisis by annihilating the resistance, or more
correctly, the entire Palestinian people. “Postponing the problem won’t solve
it. It will just explode later,” Lieberman said. Other moderate Zionists see
Gaza war as Israel ‘grass mowing’ exercise, necessary to periodically trim the
Palestinians to size.

Sadly, as the world watches
horrified by Israeli savagery and inhumanity and the UNSC passes a non-binding
resolution that calls for de-escalation, everything Palestinian has become a
fitting target for Israel's Nazi-like campaign to the sheer joy and amusement of
Israelis. President Mahmoud Abbas is asking the UnitedNations to put the state of Palestine under "international
protection" due tothe worsening violence in
Gaza. He has also asked Switzerland, the depository of thefourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in wartime, to
asksignatories to place
sanctions on Israel which, as the occupying power, isresponsible for the safety of civilians.In a
letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Abbas asked that he convene an
urgent meeting of the Security Council to respond to his request for
international protection under U.N. auspices of Gaza, the West Bank and East
Jerusalem.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on
Friday expressed alarm at the Israeli military operations resulting in the
killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, as well as the indiscriminate firing
of rockets from Gaza into Israel. She appealed to all sides to abide by their
obligations under international human rights law and international humanitarian
law.

“Israel, Hamas, and
Palestinian armed groups in Gaza have been down this road before, and it has
led only to death, destruction, distrust and a painful prolongation of the
conflict,” Pillay said. “This time around, once again, civilians are bearing
the brunt of the conflict. I urge all sides to steadfastly respect their
obligations under international human rights law and international humanitarian
law to protect civilians.”

“For its part, the Government of Israel must take all
possible measures to ensure full respect for the principles of distinction,
proportionality and precautions in attack, during the conduct of hostilities,
as required by international humanitarian law. In all circumstances, they must
avoid targeting civilians,” she said. “However, we have received deeply
disturbing reports that many of the civilian casualties, including of children,
occurred as a result of strikes on homes. Such reports raise serious doubt
about whether the Israeli strikes have been in accordance with international
humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

The targeting of civilian homes is a violation of
international humanitarian law unless the homes are being used for military
purposes. In case of doubt, buildings ordinarily used for civilian purposes,
such as homes, are presumed not to be legitimate military targets. Even where a
home is identified as being used for military purposes, any attack must be proportionate,
offer a definite military advantage in the prevailing circumstances at the
time, and precautions must be taken.

“Every alleged breach of international law must be promptly,
independently, thoroughly and effectively investigated, with a view to ensuring
justice and reparations for the victims,” Pillay said.

But who or what organization will ensure that justice is
carried out and victims compensated for their losses and sufferings? With the
American government and the powerful Jewish lobby and the ‘Amen’ Corner in the
Capitol Hill always standing behind the pariah state, Israeli leaders have
proven time and again that they have no desire to reform their murderous
instincts and practices.

Sir Kaufman said, “The present Israeli government
ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the
slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of
Palestinians.” The truth is, Netanyahu has been following the footsteps of his
predecessors! He knows the power of the Jewish lobby more than Obama himself.

It was, therefore, no accident that on June 23 Boston’s
transit authority, the MBTA, decided to remove advertisements highlighting
Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians from Boston’s subway transit
system under pressure from pro-Israel groups and in an apparent violation of
its own policies. The ad read, “Since September, 2000 Israel’s Military has
killed one Palestinian child every four days, using U.S. tax dollars. End U.S.
support for Israeli apartheid.”

Boston-based non-profit Ads Against Apartheid (AAA), which
sponsored the ad campaign, believes the MBTA’s action is a violation of its
right to freedom of speech. An official working closely with the MBTA told AAA
by telephone that the ads were likely removed because they were found to be
“demeaning to the state of Israel.” Richard Colbath-Hess, Jewish co-founder of AAA,
emphasized that the ads criticize the behavior of the Israeli government, not
any national group or individual.

Interestingly, this same transit authority ran Islamophobic
anti-Muslim ads by Pam Geller’s group “American Freedom Defense Initiative”.
AAA president and co-founder, Chadi Salamoun noted, “There is certainly a
double standard here. Our ads present facts cited by respectable institutions.”
“The MBTA has allowed anti-Palestinian groups to display opinionated messages
that border on hate-speech,” he said in reference to a pro-Israel ad that the
American Freedom Defense Initiative sponsored in early 2014, which sought to
draw a contrast between what it called “the civilized man” and “those engaged
in savage acts,” clearly implying that Palestinians comprise the latter.

“Aren’t they
demeaning to Palestinians? The MBTA can’t use its position to give voice to the
Israeli position while silencing ads that highlight human rights abuses that
the Israeli government commits daily,” Colbath-Hess said.

It is good to see that conscientious Jews like Colbeth-Hess,
who are opposed to apartheid Israel, are challenging the monopoly of Zionists inside
the USA. Who knows one day with many such activists, the USA will refuse to be
exploited by its neo-Nazi blood-suckers!

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About Me

I have a long history of a peaceful activist in my effort towards improving human rights and creating a just and equitable world. I have written extensively in the arena of humanity, global politics, social conscience and human rights since 1980, many of which have appeared in newspapers, magazines, journals and the Internet. I have tirelessly championed the cause of the disadvantaged, the poor and the forgotten here in Americas and abroad. Commenting on my articles, others have said, "His meticulously researched essays and articles combined with real human dimensions on the plight of the displaced peoples of Rohingya in Myanmar, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, and American Muslims in the post-9/11 era have made him a singular important intellectual offering a sane voice with counterpoints to the shrill threats of the oppressors and the powerful. He offers a fresh and insightful perspective on a whole generation of a misunderstood and displaced people with little or no voice of their own." I have authored 13 books, 10 of which are now available through the Amazon.com.